1. Technical Field
The present invention relates in general to the field of shipment packaging, and in particular to pallets. Still more particularly, the present invention relates to a pallet ramp used to unload a product that has been shipped on a pallet, and incorporates the use of a safety retainer that prevents the product from being unloaded from the pallet unless the pallet ramp is properly positioned with and secured to the pallet.
2. Description of the Related Art
Large and heavy products, such as computer servers, are typically shipped to a customer on a pallet. Upon delivery, the shipment must be manually offloaded from the pallet. To prevent jarring and damage to the product caused by the product being dropped off the edge of the pallet, which is typically several inches high, the shipment is slid off the pallet using a ramp. Consider, for example, the arrangement shown in FIG. 1a. A shipment 102 is shipped to a customer's site on a pallet 104, which is set on the ground 106. To avoid jarring damage that could result from simply sliding the shipment 102 off the right side of the pallet 104, a ramp 108 is secured by a latch 110 to the pallet 104, providing a slide on which the shipment 102 can be moved to the ground 106.
The system shown in FIG. 1a works fine as long as latch 110 securely attaches ramp 108 to pallet 104. However, assume that ramp 108 and pallet 104 are not properly aligned, resulting in latch 110 not being properly aligned. The result is shown in FIG. 1b, which depicts the end result of ramp 108 falling to the ground 106 while supporting the load of shipment 102. Shipment 102 has thus fallen to the ground 106 from a distance that is the height of pallet 104. If shipment 102 is a fragile product, such as a populated computer server chassis, the fall likely caused expensive, if not irreparable, damage to shipment 102.